Seeing Our Son at the City Club of Cleveland

It cost us $13 to park yesterday (Monday) and $25@ to eat. But--the good news--Joyce and I got to see and hear our son, Steve, speak at the City Club of Cleveland, right on Euclid Ave., the same venue where, on Wednesday, the President of the United States is also speaking. Not a bad week for the City Club.

Many of you know Steve from Harmon School (where I taught him in eighth grade English--1985-86) and Western Reserve Academy (where Joyce taught him in English II (87-88) and English IV-AP (89-90)). Here's a little catch-up for those who don't know what he's been doing since those days ...

After he graduated from college, Steve got a master's in journalism at Kent State University, then worked as a reporter for the Akron Beacon-Journal for ten years, earning a (shared) nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. He started taking law classes at night at the Univ. of Akron, finished his program, passed the bar, then went into politics, serving two terms as a Representative in the Ohio Legislature. He lost in 2010 (along with just about every other Democrat in the state) and joined a think tank in Columbus--Innovation Ohio--as their "education policy fellow." (Link to their website.) He had specialized in education issues in the statehouse. He's also--in his "spare time"--teaching writing courses at the Univ. of Akron. His wife, Melissa, teaches in the nursing program at KSU, and their two sons, Logan and Carson, are, respectively, in fourth grade and kindergarten. Great boys, both.

Anyway, Steve was making a presentation yesterday about charter schools--a hot topic in Ohio (since so many of them are performing so poorly--not all by any means, but most). He spiced up the statistics with slides showing scenes from Star Wars films, from Home Alone, and some others. The questions afterwards were generally amiable--and he handled well the less-than-amiable ones.

One year--when Steve was in sixth grade--I was one of the assistant coaches on his little league baseball team. (And, of course, Joyce and I watched a lot of his games even in those years when I didn't coach.) I also directed him in seven play productions when he was at Harmon Middle School. The point: I always got extremely nervous when he was pitching, batting, coming out onto the stage.

And guess what? It hasn't changed. I was a wreck yesterday--until he got going, and I realized--once again--that there was no real reason for wreckage. He can handle himself perfectly well without dragging behind him the freight car of his father's worry.

Proud of that boy. Who's no longer a boy, of course.

PS--Thanks to Jerry Brodsky, who was Steve's middle school principal, and Bill Lavezzi, who was an Aurora colleague of mine, for coming out to support Steve yesterday.

Son Steve with his proud parents at
the City Club of Cleveland
(photo by Jerry Brodsky)

Frankenstein Sundae, 108

This was not the first time I’d gone where I wasn’t supposed to in my various literary excursions. I’ve already mentioned the gut-churning experience at Sing Sing Prison (John Cheever-related), but here are a few more that have accelerated my heart rate for various reasons.

June 23, 2005: In Ketchum, Idaho, Joyce and I drove near the home on East Canyon Run where Hemingway spent his final days—where, early in the morning of July 2, 1961, he blew his brains out with a shotgun. (This was the summer after my junior year in high school.) At the entrance to East Canyon Run is a very unambiguous sign:PRIVATE PROPERTY: No Trespassing. We drove right in, Joyce keeping the car running while I swiftly circled the house, taking pictures. No one else was around. We quickly drove out, giddy and high as the nearby mountains.

June 30, 2006: In Lake Forest, Illinois (where we’d lived during the 1978–1979 academic year, both of us teaching at Lake Forest College), Joyce and I found the former home of Ginevra

King, a young woman whom the young F. Scott Fitzgerald had fallen in love with (and on whom he based a number of characters, including Daisy Buchanan). On Ridge Road—a route with many impressive homes (even for Lake Forest, which is a synonym for “Impressive Homes”)—we found the place, drove right in the driveway. Once again, I hopped out and fired away with my digital camera. We sped away before any SWAT teams arrived.

There have been many other such episodes in our literary adventures, but probably the best involved Willa Cather. In the summer of 2005, the juniors at Western Reserve Academy were all reading Cather’s My Ántonia, a novel that takes place in Cather’s beloved Nebraska (she’d moved there with her family from Back Creek, Virginia, when she was nine). I was spending the summer reading all of Cather’s works—and visiting as many places significant to her as I could, assembling a PowerPoint presentation I was going to use with my classes in the fall.

Anyway, Cather based the character of Ántonia on a young woman she’d known in Red Cloud, Nebraska—a young woman named Annie Sadilek Pavelka. Joyce and I learned on our journey to Red Cloud that summer that the Pavelka farm was still standing—though unoccupied. It was, we learned in town, undergoing renovation. And so we drove some dirt roads to find it.

Sunday Sundries, 41

1. AOTW #2. I am driving north on Ohio 91, approaching the intersection of Ohio 303. Green light in my direction. A southbound guy turns left right in front of me. I brake hard. Barely miss him. Behind me--no cars for about a half-mile--and the light is not about to change. So ... an easy choice this week for the AOTW.

2. I finished some books this week.

• The Raven (George Hazleton, 1909) is a novel about Edgar Poe, published 100 years after his birth. It deals with his love life--with his marriage to his cousin Virginia Clemm (and her subsequent death to TB) and his later relationship with Helen Whitman. As a novel it's not very good, but I enjoyed seeing how Hazleton played with the Poe story, inventing dialogue and characters and situations. Poe, for example, continually hears/sees/imagines a black bird (hmmm)--e.g., "The wing of a big black bird cast its shadow across my cup" (80). There's also a slave--Erebus ("the faithful negro")--whose appearance in the sight of our modern eyes is profoundly un-PC (132). This person is one of Hazleton's creations. Those who have read all of Poe know that he--brought up in antebellum Virginia--was not exactly, uh, ready to join the march in Selma. Hazleton changes the facts about the death of Poe, having him die in the presence of Helen Whitman. Near the end he hears "the ominous flapping" of the black bird's wings, and lightning is flashing at his window (341). (He was actually found incoherent in a Baltimore street and died in a hospital.)
• Also finished American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad (Roy Morris, Jr., 2015), a book about the international travels of Twain. Basically, the book summarizes Twain's travels and travel books (the first, The Innocents Abroad, 1869, made him famous; several others would follow). I've read all of those books, so I didn't really learn a lot from his short volume (only 240 pp of text), but there were some reminders about his ability to mimic speech, to work ungodly hours while he was writing--and how deaths in his family propelled his writing into ever darker territory.

• Finally (in Book World)--I'm getting ready to review a new biography of Saul Bellow and am re-reading (or, in some cases, reading for the first time) his novels from long ago. This week I re-read his Dangling Man (published 1944--the year of my birth), a novel I'd read back in the late 1960s, before I met Joyce. I can "see" myself, slumped on the couch in my tiny apartment in Aurora, reading that novel, which is about the draft and World War II, seeing the relevance to my own situation--the draft for the Vietnam War. As I read it this week, I remembered virtually nothing about it--not even its basic structure (a series of journal entries). I guess I could have told you that it's about a young man waiting to be inducted. But that's it. But Bellow did a fine job of showing us life in the interstices that lie between our past and our future--the area we call the present, which, as Bellow describes, can seem endless--and pointless.

3. I posted a few months ago about how I was giving up book reviewing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, something I'd been doing with great pleasure since November 2000, when I reviewed one of the volumes of Ian Kershaw's fine biography of Adolf Hitler. Lately, though, I've been feeling better (more energy ... why?), and my editor at the PD (who'd told me when I'd "retired" that I could return any time) has given me a few more titles to review. The first (Mary Doria Russell's Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral) ran last week (link to that review; the next is in May. I'm thrilled, of course, and hope I can keep it going for a long, long time.

4. Finally--Joyce and I went to see the recent comedy Unfinished Business on Friday night. We figured it would be pretty bad (it is), but, hey, it was Friday; we'd seen all the good films; we wanted popcorn. Yes, it had its amusing moments (we both laughed now and then)--I especially liked when Vince Vaughn slept in what he thought was a hotel room and then realized it was an art exhibit, open to the public. And Dave Franco (James' brother) was amusing as a genial dullard who nonetheless makes good. (And what on earth was Tom Wilkinson doing in this film?) But there were some ... issues.

• We, of course, had the obligatory celebration=getting fall-down-drunk scene. (All three of our heroes drank enough to kill most normal human beings.) Somehow, we're supposed to believe that these three were able to recover swiftly and painlessly the next morning. 
• We're to believe that Vaughn's character ran a marathon in his street shoes and business suit and finished without even perspiring.
• Someone asks Vaughn's character why he does the job he does if it's boring. He says he has a kid who has go to go private school. (Don't get me started on the conceptions of Vaughn's children in this film--and on the Daddying-by-Facetime.) The only hint that maybe you ought to try to find a career that you love--not that that's always (or even often) possible, of course.
• And we're asked to accept some vile portraits of women, who, in this film are (1) devoted housewives, (2) bitchy businesswomen, (3) hookers, (4) hotel-maids-who-are-eager-to-please-in-all-ways. This aspect of the film was grotesque. Wholly misogynistic--and clueless. Hard to believe these tone-deaf filmmakers are working in 2015. And yet ... there I sat. Shame on them; shame on me.

I'm Grateful, Really ... but ...

I really am grateful. For years--for decades, really--I had no health worries whatsoever. Oh, sure, I had measles, chicken pox--even whooping cough when I was a Wee One. In the baby book my mom kept for me (for a while--soon, three sons ended all her "free" time) she has listed the following:

• May 28, 1945: bronchitis
• April 1947: chicken pox
• October 1948: measles
• March 1958: mumps (this one is in my handwriting! I was in 8th grade)

So, other than these customary childhood diseases, I really didn't experience much poor health. Colds, flu--that sort of thing. No major injuries (though I lied to some elementary school friends, telling them that a slight scar on my knee was from that time I almost got my whole leg cut off).

And throughout those carefree years, I'm sure I exhibited the unsavory signs of the Arrogance of the Healthy. It's easy--when nothing's wrong with you--to attribute the ill health of others to negligence or weakness of character or whatever. My mom--bless her--used to get on my dad's case about his eating (oh, did he love jars of dry-roasted peanuts!), though she was somewhat less attentive to her own fondness for All Things Chocolate.

So we (The Healthy) may sometimes find ourselves saying--If he'd only eat more sensibly ... If she'd only exercise more ... If [in other words] he/she were more like ME!

I see this trait, by the way, glowing garishly in comedian Bill Maher, who often chides the overweight (he isn't), the unfit (he isn't), the elderly (he isn't). I'm more aligned politically than not with Maher, but I can't stand his somatic arrogance. (Once--and I think I wrote about this in an earlier post--Maher, commenting on the racial issues that were swirling around LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, added that yes, he (Sterling) had cancer, but it was just, you know, prostate cancer--no big deal. Really? I beg to differ.)

Anyway, Time tamed me, peeled away the arrogance I'd had about my health, and began, when I entered my fifties, sending me continual Mortality Messages that were unequivocal: You are like everyone else. You are going to fade and die--just like everyone else.

Of course, I'd known that, intellectually, since I was a kid. But knowing it intimately is something entirely different. Just as you can't know what parenthood is like unless you've been a parent--or what a teacher's life is like unless you've been a teacher--you cannot really know what Mortality is like until you've looked him in his rheumy eye and smelled his fetid breath.

I've written here before about the parade of problems I've had post-50--Bell's palsy, skin cancer, prostate cancer (with failed surgery and radiation treatments--I'm now on Lupron, a drug which keeps me alive but has measurably diminished my life).

Lately, there's a new player in the game: vertigo. I have to be very cautious now about how I move along a sidewalk, how I stand or sit or shift from one to the other. It doesn't seem to bother me at all when I'm driving (if it did, I would immediately give up driving), but I'm nervous now about riding my bicycle this spring (haven't done it yet). If I feel dizzy while riding, that will mark the end of my cycling, something that began about 1952. I would miss it--a lot.

As I said at the outset, I've been very fortunate in my life in many ways. So many, many folks have had to deal with far worse circumstances than I ever have. And so I try never to whine.

But, of course, it's relative ...  I can react only to what I've known.

All of these medical issues are physical blows, surely, but they are more devastating blows to the mind--to the imagination. They are, of course, the parents of fear. Who is a most unpleasant companion.

Frankenstein Sundae, 107

I had read all of this [about Field Place] before winging to the U.K., and I’d hoped I could photograph it from Byfleets Lane (the closest local road). But I couldn’t. Hidden by foliage and distance. If I wanted to see the home where Bysshe Shelley was born and grew up, I would have to enter that driveway. That long, private driveway.

And so I did. But at least half the courage came from the cab driver, Brian, who said he’d always wanted to see the house, too. He made the turn without the slightest hesitation, drove right up that entryway as if we belonged there. Which, of course, we didn’t.

Here’s a lightly edited account from my journal entry that I wrote later that day—April 15, 1999:

We drove right in the private drive that says “Field Place Estate”—the house is not easily visible because of outbuildings and vegetation. We got near the garages, and I popped out, hoping to take a quick photo—and then run. (There were a half-dozen designer cars parked there.) I saw behind me a man on a tractor—he looked official, so I asked if I could take a few photos outside. He hesitated (he’d dealt with this before, I could tell), but I guess I looked sufficiently sheepish (I did see some sheep!) and harmless (and I told him I’d crossed the Atlantic, etc.), so he said I could take a few (he pointed out the upstairs right room where PBS was born)—but “Don’t abuse the privilege,” he warned direly. He was a middle-aged man, lean and rugged, wearing muddy boots and green work clothes. He said if anyone bothered me to say that I’d talked to Mr. P, who’d approved the taking of a few photographs. I was so excited, I had the camera set wrong—noticed it walking back to the cab—and had to trot back and re-shoot. Mr. P. laughed, and I commented that he must have to deal with this all the time. “Yes,” he agreed, “it can get awfully tiresome. It is a private residence. People are living here.” But he didn’t say this unkindly, and I believe he was grateful that I did not get him in trouble with his employers. On the way out of the drive, I got out and photographed the entrance.

             Brian was as excited as I was—he also got out of the taxi and took a good look at the house, which, although he’s lived here all his life (he’s in his 40’s), he has never seen up close. It is scarcely visible from a couple of vantage points, but many trees intervene, and I could not have gotten much of a photograph on my own.

This was not the first time I’d gone where I wasn’t supposed to in my various literary excursions. I’ve already mentioned the gut-churning experience at Sing Sing Prison (John Cheever-related), but here are a few more that have accelerated my heart rate for various reasons.

I'll add that there are now websites that feature some great photos of Field Place--in and out. Here's one of them: LINK.

Who Woulda Thunk It?

Joyce has a girlhood friend who's been posting on Facebook all sorts of old pictures, diary entries, and the like--some concerning Joyce herself. Here, for example, is a picture of Joyce and her friend in seventh grade (Joyce is on the left.) Gotta love the pearls and bejeweled glasses.

I, of course, was in seventh grade myself once upon a time (1956-57), and as I look at this school photograph now, I wonder what my Seventh Grade Self would have thought of Joyce--and, of course, what Joyce would have thought of that same Seventh Grade Self. Here's my school picture from that year.

Hiram Schools
1956-1957

We had just recently moved from Enid, Okla., to Hiram, Ohio--perhaps a month or so before this picture was taken. I was on the cusp of turning 12 (November 11), and I still have that look of Dorky Oklahoma Kid about me. Toothless smile. Jug ears. Splendid haircut. Fashionable T-shirt. There was not a letter of the word maturity that applied to me. I was "all boy"—loving sports, running around in the woods after school playing Robin Hood, annoying my brothers (one older, one younger), perplexing my parents, playing with our dog (Sooner), doing as little homework as possible.

I didn't even really know what homework was when I hit seventh grade. We'd never really had any back at Adams Elementary School in Enid. So, I figured, if I don't know what it is, then I can't really do it, can I? My grades in seventh grade were not impressive. Here are my final yearly averages for seventh grade:

• English: C 
• Phys Ed: A
• Arithmetic: C+
• Geography: B
• Gen Science: C
• Art: B- (now this was a gift: I have no art ability)
• Music: S

My parents were a little ... alarmed. I'd had great grades back in the No Homework Days. And now? Well, hell, they had three sons; it's just, you know, the Law of Averages that at least one of them is going to be ... you know? Guess it's going to be Danny ...

Joyce's seventh grade story was somewhat different. She was all A's all the time--from Kindergarten through Ph.D. She did unthinkable things--like study. Even on a Friday night--even on a Saturday! She turned in work on time, put fancy covers on her reports ...

I remember two reports I did for Geography class that year--one on Honduras, another on Ecuador. Both bore an astonishing similarity (diction and punctuation and, well, in every way, really) to the articles "Honduras" and "Ecuador" in the World Book Encyclopedia--my generation's Wikipedia. I also remember that I threw up one day in Geography--right onto the feet of an Ohio girl who'd caught my attention. Best thing about it? I got to go home for the rest of the day.

The Ohio Girl Who'd Caught My Attention did not look like the Joyce you see pictured above. My Seventh Grade Self was really incapable of seeing what's important.

Joyce would not have been the slightest bit interested in me in seventh grade. (A boy who never studies! What is that about?!?!) And vice-versa. So it's fortunate that we did not meet until the summer of 1969. She'd just graduated from Wittenberg (summa, of course); I had just finished my third year of teaching--believe it or not--seventh graders in Aurora, Ohio. I'd begun working on my master's degree (I'd taken only one course the previous fall--American Literary Realism--an A, if you want to know!), and Joyce, who was spending the summer in her Akron hometown (her mom was dealing with skin cancer), had decided to take a course at Kent--just to have something intellectual to do for the summer.

We ended up in the same class--American Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, and their BFFs). And at long, long, long last, I was ready ... or, at least, I thought I was. There were many more lessons to learn ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 106

So … I've arrived at the private driveway into Field Place, the Shelleys’ ancestral home near Warnham and Horsham. To enter or not to enter? That was the question.

Let’s pause a moment for a bit of information about the estate. Here are the words of Newman Ivey White, who in 1940 published his massive two-volume biography, Shelley. Incidentally, I don’t think such a title would fly in 2015 (as I write these words). The fame of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley has, at least in the popular culture, nearly eclipsed that of her husband. Nowadays, to avoid confusion, White would have to settle for something like Percy Bysshe Shelley instead.

Anyway, here’s what he says about Field Place:

Field Place is a comfortable, undistinguished country home that had been in the possession of the Michell[1] family for several generations. It came into the Shelley family when it was purchased in 1729 by Edward Shelley, uncle of the poet’s great-grandfather Timothy, who inherited it in 1748. The house is situated in a slight depression, but commands some view of the downs and hills in the distance. It is a two-storey structure, with slightly projecting ells at either end.[2]

Other writers supply more detail about the structure. Edward Dowden (1896) called it comfortable;[3] Walter Edwin Peck (1927) called it favorable for the children (pond, woods);[4] Roger Ingpen (1917) tells us that the core of the present building … was a timbered Sussex farmhouse, with the magnificent kitchen and the many little old rooms still remaining. … The Field Place of today is a comfortable gable structure [with a] pillared portico, or verandah, in front of the building which joins the two wings … a modern addition, put up in 1846 ….[5] And, finally (I have to stop somewhere!), Holmes adds this great detail: There was a tall oak staircase, which shone in the candlelight when he went to bed.[6]

I had read all of this before winging to the U.K., and I’d hoped I could photograph it from Byfleets Lane (the closest local road). But I couldn’t. Hidden by foliage and distance. If I wanted to see the home where Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, I would have to enter that driveway. That long, private driveway.

---

[1] Also spelled Mychell in early documents.

[2] 5.

[3] The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Kegan Paul), 3.

[4] Shelley: His Life and Work, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), I-4.

[5] Shelley in England, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), I-22.

[6] 1.